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Sian's been very naughty

Last week I did a very naughty thing. I downloaded from the internet a short film that was packed full of copyrighted material, stolen from Hollywood, American and Swedish TV news programmes, and even the BBC. It was called ‘Steal this Film – part 1’ and it has been made this year by a group of Swedish internet pirates who are intent on spreading lawlessness throughout the globe.

I don’t know how many of you have heard of The Pirate Bay, but it’s probably a lot more now than had a year ago. I confess happily to being a bit of a nerd, but the issue of file sharing at last seems to be breaking out of geekshire and into the world of mainstream politics, so it seems worth discussing at last.

Steal this Film was made by the organisers of The Pirate Bay and gives a short history of the site, how it grew out of Piratbyrån a campaigning organisation dedicated to the overthrow of copyright laws. So far, so extremely dull, you might think, but the film has a gripping plot centred on the extraordinary raid that was carried out by the Swedish police against the site’s internet servers in May this year. This incident is the reason I could be found watching a group of scandinavian tecchies on a Saturday night.

For the uninitiated, here’s a brief history of the issue. The Pirate Bay is now the most widely used and famous site where people go to find ‘bit torrents’ that allow them to download films, music, art, software (in fact anything that can be stored in digital form) from other people. Torrents don’t include these materials, but tell your computer where to find bits of the file you want on other computers that are sharing them. If you set off a torrent file, it will patiently collect thousands of tiny parts of the desired file from hundreds of different locations, and then neatly put them all back together.

Downloading large files via bittorrent is much quicker than trying to get a whole file from a single user because your computer can simultaneously download different parts from different places. And, as most people who use the service also allow uploading of the parts they already have, the more people who are downloading, the quicker the whole file comes to you.

File sharing in this way became popular after one-to-one sites like Napster were outlawed in the US a few years ago and, initially, many sites offered a bittorrent service - the most popular based in places like Slovenia and Finland. However, after putting all that effort into stopping Napster, music companies and film studios in the USA weren’t going to put up with this new challenge for long. One by one they persuaded governments to outlaw them and the sites closed.

As the alternatives were whittled away, one main site – The Pirate Bay, based in Sweden – carried on. This was allowed to continue only because of the organisers’ determined resistance to legal threats and the protection they had in Swedish law, which still recognises that torrents don’t actually contain any copyrighted material.

Admitting to file-sharing can feel like a bit of a crime to someone in the UK, akin to committing benefit fraud, but in Sweden things are completely different. People there think of it as a human right and the vast majority of young people do it regularly. Steal this Film is full of anxious vox pops with Swedish youth talking about their devotion to file sharing, and one elderly Swede even likens it to ‘the way older people look at lingonberry picking on other people’s land’ (I have no idea what this is, but it sounds lovely).

Not surprising then, that the raid on TPB sparked resentment towards the Swedish government. Protests started spontaneously in Stockholm and attracted thousands of people and the support of the Swedish Young Greens. Rumours circulated that the raid was demanded by US diplomats threatening sanctions against Sweden, and a minister seemed to confirm this on Swedish TV news.

Of course the clampdown backfired. The site was back up within days, and attracted such support and offers of back-up space that another raid would see almost no downtime at all. Personally, I would never have thought about this beyond occasionally using torrents to get hold of impossible-to-find gems, such as the nuclear war films ‘Threads’ and ‘The War Game’, had it not been for the police raid. And there is now even a ‘Pirate Party’ in Sweden, campaigning in elections on an anti-copyright ticket (I’m not sure what the Swedish Greens think about this!).

Hollywood had of course been pressing for something to be done about the Swedish law for ages. With just one country holding out, the nature of the internet means it provides a loop-hole for the entire world. The Motion Picture Association of America claims that internet piracy cost it $7.1 billion in 2005 and produces flashy adverts where James Cameron and Ben Affleck plead with you not to risk the jobs of movie makers by downloading.

But can those claims be true? Would all those people have spent more than $10 on a DVD instead if they couldn’t download a particular film? And where did the lost money go? Unlike when you buy a dodgy DVD off a man in the pub, no one is making a profit out of this. Not sitting in a jacuzzi quaffing champagne in their filmed interviews - instead hanging out in a scruffy bar - none of the organisers of TPB are getting rich off file sharing. So if money can just evaporate into thin air, can it really be described as ‘lost’?

Films are still making plenty of cash for the studios, despite the growth of file sharing, and the music industry’s profits grew healthily in 2005 as the labels took advantage of cash-for-download sites to sell more music than ever.

Historically, similar threats to creative profit have occurred regularly. With the advent of recorded music in the early 20th century, performance musicians staged protests and petitioned governments to stop it. In 1982, Jack Valenti, President of the MPAA told the US House of Representatives, “The VCR is to the American film producer and the American public as the Boston Strangler is to the woman home alone.” Yet somehow the industry struggled on as every home gained a video recorder, and even made extra cash selling us copies of ‘classic’ films that had stopped making money in theatres years before.

At around this point in ‘Steal this Film’, I’m starting to doubt that copyright should exist at all, clearly influenced by the propaganda effect of the many short clips from epic movies (overlaid with slogans like ‘You can’t outlaw social change’) which the directors have inserted into the film.

Luckily, also at this point, film director Alex Cox appears on the screen, commenting on the industry killer/massive profit opportunity incident with VCRs in the 80s. Alex is a Green Party member and has directed our recent party political broadcasts, so I decided to ask him what he thought.

It turned out he hadn’t known he was in the film at all, the pirate film-makers having stolen the footage from an old episode of The Money Programme - “Good for them,” he said. I asked whether, as a producer of content himself, he wouldn’t object to the abolition of copyright. “It is reasonable to get some exclusivity,” he said, “But the period of copyright is far too long.”

Suggesting that ten years might be a sensible time limit, he told me that the original copyright law of the USA gave artists 14 years, but this has been gradually extended under big business pressure so that now US law protects copyright for longer than anyone who created the work could feasibly stay alive. The so-called ‘Mickey Mouse Protection Act’ of 1998 now allows exclusive rights for a staggering 95 years. We’re not quite there in Europe, with a standard period for most things sticking at 50 years for now (hence Sir Cliff Richard is about to lose the rights to his early hits).

There’s a lot more to this issue, which I’ll try to cover another time but, on balance, I don’t think I want to see copyright abolished altogether. The ten-year term suggested by Alex seems like a sensible compromise. I love seeing films on a massive screen with mad, seat-shaking sound, and I also like watching things with others in a theatre so I don’t really want to see cinemas driven out of business.

But I also don’t see how downloading is harming these businesses at all. Cinemas do of course offer a lot more in their ‘package’ than simply the copyrighted works on show, including a comfy seat, a social venue and (perhaps this is unique to me) the chance to boo at 4x4 adverts in a place where other people might actually hear me.

However, especially with music, I’m inclined to agree that copyright terms should be as short as possible. Doesn’t leaving the control of recorded music in the hands of a few big companies actually restrict choice, variety and innovation in our music? And if established songwriters can now sit back and live off past royalties for decades, wouldn’t they work a bit harder to produce decent new material if they lost that income after a few years?

When we talked about music rights, Alex Cox gave the example of Sir George Martin, who has spent most of his career since the Beatles simply remixing and re-releasing their works, which are some of the most tightly controlled in the world. Wouldn’t the arts world be richer if Sir George had more incentive to discover and work with new bands too?

What is clear is that selling a plastic disc with data on it purely for the value of the data, is not going to last. The creative industries are sooner or later going to have to find new ways to profit from their art, or even (shock!) just profit less and create their works for art’s sake instead.

Sian Berry lives in Kentish Town and was previously a principal speaker and campaigns co-ordinator for the Green Party. She was also their London mayoral candidate in 2008. She works as a writer and is a founder of the Alliance Against Urban 4x4s

MP Michelle Thomson's full speech on rape at 14: "I am a survivor"

On Thursday, the independent MP for Edinburgh West Michelle Thomson used a debate marking the UN’s International Day for the Elimination of Violence against Women to describe her own experience of rape. Thomson, 51, said she wanted to break the taboo among her generation about speaking about the subject.

MPs listening were visibly moved by the speech, and afterwards Thomson tweeted she was "overwhelmed" by the response.

Here is her speech in full:

I am going to relay an event that happened to me many years ago. I want to give a very personal perspective to help people, both in this place and outside, understand one element of sexual violence against women.

When I was 14, I was raped. As is common, it was by somebody who was known to me. He had offered to walk me home from a youth event. In those days, everybody walked everywhere - it was quite common. It was early evening. It was not dark. I was wearing— I am imagining and guessing—jeans and a sweatshirt. I knew my way around where I lived - I was very comfortable - and we went a slightly differently way, but I did not think anything of it. He told me that he wanted to show me something in a wooded area. At that point, I must admit that I was alarmed. I did have a warning bell, but I overrode that warning bell because I knew him and, therefore, there was a level of trust in place. To be honest, looking back at that point, I do not think I knew what rape was. It was not something that was talked about. My mother never talked to me about it, and I did not hear other girls or women talking about it.

It was mercifully quick and I remember first of all feeling surprise, then fear, then horror as I realised that I quite simply could not escape, because obviously he was stronger than me. There was no sense, even initially, of any sexual desire from him, which, looking back again, I suppose I find odd. My senses were absolutely numbed, and thinking about it now, 37 years later, I cannot remember hearing anything when I replay it in my mind. As a former professional musician who is very auditory, I find that quite telling. I now understand that your subconscious brain—not your conscious brain—decides on your behalf how you should respond: whether you take flight, whether you fight or whether you freeze. And I froze, I must be honest.

Afterwards I walked home alone. I was crying, I was cold and I was shivering. I now realise, of course, that that was the shock response. I did not tell my mother. I did not tell my father. I did not tell my friends. And I did not tell the police. I bottled it all up inside me. I hoped briefly—and appallingly—that I might be pregnant so that that would force a situation to help me control it. Of course, without support, the capacity and resources that I had within me to process it were very limited.

I was very ashamed. I was ashamed that I had “allowed this to happen to me”. I had a whole range of internal conversations: “I should have known. Why did I go that way? Why did I walk home with him? Why didn’t I understand the danger? I deserved it because I was too this, too that.” I felt that I was spoiled and impure, and I really felt revulsion towards myself.

Of course, I detached from the child that I had been up until then. Although in reality, at the age of 14, that was probably the start of my sexual awakening, at that time, remembering back, sex was “something that men did to women”, and perhaps this incident reinforced that early belief.​
I briefly sought favour elsewhere and I now understand that even a brief period of hypersexuality is about trying to make sense of an incident and reframing the most intimate of acts. My oldest friends, with whom I am still friends, must have sensed a change in me, but because I never told them they did not know of the cause. I allowed myself to drift away from them for quite a few years. Indeed, I found myself taking time off school and staying at home on my own, listening to music and reading and so on.

I did have a boyfriend in the later years of school and he was very supportive when I told him about it, but I could not make sense of my response - and it is my response that gives weight to the event. I carried that guilt, anger, fear, sadness and bitterness for years.

When I got married 12 years later, I felt that I had a duty tell my husband. I wanted him to understand why there was this swaddled kernel of extreme emotion at the very heart of me, which I knew he could sense. But for many years I simply could not say the words without crying—I could not say the words. It was only in my mid-40s that I took some steps to go and get help.

It had a huge effect on me and it fundamentally - and fatally - undermined my self-esteem, my confidence and my sense of self-worth. Despite this, I am blessed in my life: I have been happily married for 25 years. But if this was the effect of one small, albeit significant, event in my life stage, how must it be for those women who are carrying it on a day-by-day basis?

I thought carefully about whether I should speak about this today, and it was people’s intake of breath and the comment, “What? You’re going to talk about this?”, that motivated me to do it, because there is still a taboo about sharing this kind of information. Certainly for people of my generation, it is truly shocking to talk in public about this sort of thing.

As has been said, rape does not just affect the woman; it affects the family as well. Before my mother died early of cancer, I really wanted to tell her, but I could not bring myself to do it. I have a daughter and if something happened to her and she could not share it with me, I would be appalled. It was possibly cowardly, but it was an act of love that meant that I protected my mother.

As an adult, of course I now know that rape is not about sex at all - it is all about power and control, and it is a crime of violence. I still pick up on when the myths of rape are perpetuated form a male perspective: “Surely you could have fought him off. Did you scream loudly enough?” And the suggestion by some men that a woman is giving subtle hints or is making it up is outrageous. Those assumptions put the woman at the heart of cause, when she should be at the heart of effect. A rape happens when a man makes a decision to hurt someone he feels he can control. Rapes happen because of the rapist, not because of the victim.

We women in our society have to stand up for each other. We have to be courageous. We have to call things out and say where things are wrong. We have to support and nurture our sisters as we do with our sons. Like many women of my age, I have on occasion encountered other aggressive actions towards me, both in business and in politics. But one thing that I realise now is that I am not scared and he was. I am not scared. I am not a victim. I am a survivor.

Julia Rampen is the editor of The Staggers, The New Statesman's online rolling politics blog. She was previously deputy editor at Mirror Money Online and has worked as a financial journalist for several trade magazines.